Friday, October 25, 2013

The Dream Collector

East
London schools seem to be in my life a lot at the moment. They often are, of
course, but after a bit of time away from them in the past 18 months, at the
moment several projects seem to be converging to make it feel like my schools
work is back with a bang.

Not
only is there Schoolwrights, the UK’s first playwrights-in-schools training
scheme which I launched this month, but I’m also at the early stages of
planning a new Mulberry show for 2014’s Edinburgh Fringe, for which I’ve just
had the budget approved. 2014 will be Mulberry’s 50th anniversary,
and they want to go back to Edinburgh to celebrate, the first time we will have
been since 2009 and The Unravelling, which won us a Scotsman Fringe First.

As
if that wasn’t enough, I’ve got a new schools show about to open, which will be
the inaugural show in Mulberry’s new theatre, which I helped to found and which
has just been built. It’s not only East London’s newest performing arts space –
available for hire - which we’ll be showing off, but a new way of working too.

The Dream Collector is a 16-hander for a cast of teenagers which I developed across
two schools last year, Mulberry and St Paul’s Way Trust School in Bow. Each
year, Mulberry and I have sought to evolve the way we work in some way, and
this year, for the first time, we decided to try to develop a play across two
schools simultaneously. This is part of a broader push to build on Mulberry’s
expertise in developing new writing with and for East London’s young people, by
bringing in new partners and sharing some of their practice.

However,
it quickly became clear in the planning stages of The Dream Collector that ferrying
two groups of young actors back and forth each week, to attend developmental
sessions with me, was going to prove far too costly and time-consuming.

Then
I had an idea. It was far easier for the ideas, rather than the people, to move
back and forth. So, I came up with a plan whereby I would hold two after-school
sessions per week, one in Mulberry and one in St Paul’s Way. Each week, one
group would develop part of the story, then send the ideas, through me, back to
the other school, who would develop the next part, then send them back again –
and so on. It became a sort of long-distance version of the game Consequences. The
two groups of participants never actually met – the first time was at the first
draft read through.

The
idea I came up with was a while coming into focus, but bears the hallmarks of
both groups, and is a true collaboration.

One
week in Mulberry, we were doing a session on possible locations for the play,
and the girls came up with two unrelated ideas – one a spooky old country
house, and the other, a trip to the cinema. In the session at St Paul’s Way, we
put these two together, and came up with the idea of a spooky country house, which
is discovered to have a disused cinema in the basement. The cast are a group of
East London teenagers on a Media Studies school trip; the house belonged to an
early black-and-white movie pioneer. Having slipped away from their teachers in
the night, the young friends discover the art deco screening room, complete
with old-style projector and cans of films. They kick back for a night at the
movies... But what do they see on the screen?

For
a while, I had absolutely no idea what they would see on the screen. The
suggestions

from both groups struggled to get past teen horror movie territory.
But then in one session, as so often happens, an informal chat took place after
the session itself has finished, in which the final piece of the jigsaw fell
into place.

Completely
unprompted, the students started telling me about their dreams. They were
unlike dreams I had had myself for years – dark, dystopian and shot through
with mysterious symbols and cryptic imagery. I remembered having vivid dreams
during adolescence, though I had forgotten quite how potent and disturbing they
could be. Perhaps it is something to do with the way the brain is developing at
this age? But it was extraordinarily rich material for the play. What they would
see projected onto that movie screen were their own dreams. The house became
that of Charles Somna, and the ‘movie projector’ his legendary invention, the
mysterious Somnagraph...

Writing
a play for two schools was a particular challenge. Clearly, it required a large
cast. But at this time we were also intending to have a mixed cast, drawn from
both schools. The logistics of organising this were still challenging, and I realised
I would have to structure the play in such a way as to allow considerable
chunks of it to be rehearsed separately by the two groups. So, I came up with a
core cast of 8 named characters, who exist in the ‘real world’ of the play –
modern East London. Each of them also had a shadow double, a group called The
Neverborn, who exist only in the dream world, trapped and restless, like ghosts.
After circling each other for the first half of the play, these two eventually converge
in the dusty old basement cinema...

However,
eventually even this proved impractical. How would two teacher-directors work
together simultaneously, and how would two groups share the same set? So
eventually, it was decided to rehearse up two entirely separate shows. The happy
outcome of this was that, at a stroke, twice the amount of young people could
be involved (32 in total – and that’s just the onstage cast) effectively halving
the cost-per-head of the project for each school. It also meant that the two teacher-directors
could bring their own visions and creativity to bear in full, and that each
group could watch one another’s shows, and potentially even write about the two
interpretations for their GCSE coursework. It was a happy outcome all round.In
fact, in this model of shared development, though something of an accident at
the time, we inadvertently hit upon a new way to R and D new plays at reduced
cost. Two schools share the costs of the play commission and workshop time, and
both get a large cast play out of it. There are two full productions, two
directors, two technical teams, double the parts, double the design possibilities
– the whole thing becomes hugely more cost effective. I even began to wonder
whether a third school could have been involved...The
only down side is that school productions being what they are – time-consuming
for both teachers and students – they can only be put on for short runs.
Mulberry’s version of The Dream Collector will only have two public
performances: on Friday 15 November and Saturday 16 November, both at 6.30pm.
Tickets are only £5 each and are available to buy here. I’d love it if you
could come along.

But
if you can’t - there will be another chance to see St Paul’s Way Trust School’s
version of the same play in December. So there are double the chances to catch
it too.

There
is a page with more about the play on my main website here. I had a sneak
preview of a section of the production over the summer, and it’s a real
stunner. It’s the same designer, Barbara Fuchs, who we had on The Unravelling
and our director Shona Davidson was assistant on that show too – so it is
pretty much the same award-winning team, and the same glowingly imaginative aesthetic.
It’s undoubtedly the most technically challenging show I’ve ever written for
Mulberry, but they have risen to the challenge in an astonishing way.

Any
school which can stage dreams gets my vote. I hope you can come along to see
what they’ve achieved.

----------------------------------------------------------------------UPDATE 20 NOVEMBER:The dates for the second production of The Dream Collector, by St Paul's Way Trust School in Bow, have now been announced. They are:Wednesday 4 Dec, 4.30pmThursday 5 Dec, 6.30pmFriday 6 Dec, 5pm

Running time 1 hour.

Performances take place in the school theatre on the main school site:

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About Me

UK playwright and Artistic Director of Tamasha theatre company - though blogging here in a personal capacity.
My plays are produced in the UK and abroad, and most are published by Nick Hern Books. I teach on the MA Dramatic Writing at Central Saint Martins and for the past ten years I have been writer-in-residence in a school in East London.
Theatre, politics and teaching (or any combination) are the main subjects on here.
Full bio on my main website www.finkennedy.co.uk/about
For current projects follow me on Twitter: @finkennedy